Twitter eyes more bucks from selling tweets

TWITTER   DIRECT MARKETING    ONLINE PRIVACY

Global - Micro-blogging site Twitter is getting aggressive in generating revenues, allowing advertises to access users' old tweets helping them offer more targeted advertising.

The social networking site, which processes about 250 million tweets a day, currently only allows advertisers to access tweets that are 30-days old. Now, it is increasing the time period to past 24 months.

Users themselves are able to access their own tweets from only seven days ago. 

Together with its partner Datasift, a UK-based social data platform, Twitter is asking for a fee of £635 (S$1300) a month for an entry level package, marketing manager Tim Barker told The Daily Telegraph.

Twitter's terms of service allows it the freedom to use anybody's tweets.

While some industry players are not surprised by the move, others say it is too intrusive and creates a lack of trust for the brand.

"Analysing tweeted content is important for providing advertising which is contextually relevant to what is being tweeted about. In short, no surprise here," Mike Langton, vice president of business development of Adz in APAC, said.

According to Langton, companies providing social media tracking and analytics have already been examining this sort of content for years, noting their sentiments, gauging their intensity and assessing their degree of influence among the community commenting on their brands.

"For marketers who've subscribed to those services for some time, there will probably be little new here," added Langton. 

However, Paul Soon, CEO at XM Asia Pacific, said Twitter is seen and used as a channel that one can express one's self and not be expected to be re-targeted or marketed at.

"It's not different from Google saying that they are going to ‘look through' our Gmail accounts and send us better targeted ads that has a huge privacy implication," he said adding that Twitter should maintain itself as a means to broadcast information, and consumers can mention and hashtag them if they want the attention.

Surseh Ramaswamy, director of digital business at Leo Burnett Group Singapore, disagreed, saying it provides rich data for insights, and is a good revenue move for Twitter.

"These will be valuable inputs to the design of campaigns and ongoing conversations. Twitter has always been like a neighborhood bar to share and chat with the known, unknown and the famous. Having joined an open network, people should be aware anything they've posted is for public view. If this helps reduce interruptive advertising, people should feel better off," he said.

 

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